Ethical Leadership a Crucial Factor in the Life Sciences Sector

Psychologists have long known that most of us are rarely honest with ourselves. Studies have suggested that, even jailed criminals rated themselves as kinder, more moral, more trustworthy and honest than the average member of the public (3). People in general radically over-rate their own sense of moral decency and are usually more cautious in their judgement about the moral decency of others. (4) This can be amplified in leadership populations, particularly in science led industries where status, seniority and educational achievement have the potential to create a unconscious bias towards the efficacy of one’s own decisions.

In the pharmaceutical sector in particular, deep expertise resides in almost every part of the organisation. However this deep and expert knowledge is often confined to within functional siloes. Sharing knowledge across specialisms is difficult because it is so difficult to codify for those who ‘don’t speak the language’. The danger is that specialists (such a deep medical, compliance or commercial experts) chance not being challenged by others around them – or at least by those who reside elsewhere in the business and might see another ‘story’.

For this reason, there is an increased need for leaders to be given feedback on the quality of their decisions. If a leader’s decisions seem self-serving, this should be highlighted with openness and honesty, because it is unlikely the leader will have spotted it. In this manner, leaders and team members all play a role in holding a mirror up to those in power, or in positions of influence. This is also true of peers who might reside in other functions or specialisms.

A clear organizational purpose or a set of guiding principles or values has long been recognised as essential to all large organisations.

Michael Gibney, a writer with PharmaVoice, takes large pharmaceutical companies like Johnson and Johnson as an example, where patient safety is stated as a core consideration for everyone.

“It’s an integral part of our decision making,” says Dr. Craig Tendler, vice president of oncology clinical development and global medical affairs at J&J Innovative Medicine… “Johnson & Johnson has a credo … that everything we do has to be for the benefit of patients. It is a core element of our plans, our decision making and everything we do.” (5)

One of the reasons why a credo, or a set of organisational values are important for leaders is that they dissuade us from being potentially ‘led astray’ by others or influenced by ‘group think’. For example, the effect of team norms can be a powerful influence on us. Much of the time the ‘group’ to which we belong will keep us in check by giving the kind of feedback I’ve described above. However, the groups we belong to can also drive us towards unethical decision-making.

Diane Vaughan – an American sociologist– is probably most famous for coining the phrase ‘Normalisation of Deviance’. This is where a clearly unsafe practice comes to be considered ‘normal’ by the team if it is repeated and does not immediately cause a catastrophe. The idea is simple, if everyone around is embarking on ethical questionable behaviours (and getting away with it) then eventually we will too.

Organisational values or principles remind us that there is an ethical ‘north star’ that we all should follow when making complex decisions. Ethical leaders not only espouse these as the organisation’s credo when acting on behalf of the organisation, but they live by them too. Their persistent role-modelling of the right attitudes and behaviours does not allow an inch of space for normalising this kind of harmful deviation.

Ethical leaders are guided by – and guide others by – A clear organisational credo.

Few sectors will change as much and as fast as the life sciences sector over the next decade. This will require leaders to constantly reevaluate and revisit their positions in light of new commercial, technical and medical models and approaches.

Each new development has the potential to conjure up ethical and moral dilemmas that we simply haven’t encountered before. Novelty can be intimidating. Daniel Kahnemann (6) references ‘Ego Depletion’ to describe the fact that we sometimes become tired and lazy in our thinking when faced with novelty and complexity. Ethical leaders need to be vigilant to this bias and be willing to constantly evaluate their own ethical positions as the world moves rapidly around them.

One example of this is the AI revolution. Here the question is; ‘How will ethical leaders lead in a world where Artificial Intelligence is making many of the decisions for us’?

For example, drug development and research are a dependent on large data sets. One of the major ethical concerns in the life sciences sector is the potential for AI to perpetuate or even exacerbate biases present in the data it is trained on – potentially impacting treatment recommendations (7). So, despite the capabilities of AI, human oversight remains critical. Ethical decision-making in biopharma should involve a combination of AI insights and human judgement (what some researchers describe as ‘algorithmic audits’) to ensure that decisions are made in the best interests of patients.

Leaders within the life sciences sector must be ‘in front’ of these developments, ensuring that the very human science of ethics is applied to the very inhuman generative and large language models that will pervade our lives.